


fall apart without me, body

by Anonymous



Series: a feeling's not a thing you own [13]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Body Horror, Depression, Eating Disorders, Gen, Gore, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:07:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21749518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Patton is dead, but Logan and Virgil seem to want to work out new problems, and not the source.Thomas just wants his Creativity back.
Relationships: Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Logic | Logan Sanders, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Thomas Sanders, Creativity | Roman "Princey" Sanders & Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders, Creativity | Roman "Princey" Sanders & Thomas Sanders, Logic | Logan Sanders & Thomas Sanders
Series: a feeling's not a thing you own [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1453462
Comments: 3
Kudos: 30
Collections: anonymous





	fall apart without me, body

**Author's Note:**

> *passionate dabbing* CON-TENT WAR-NINGS CON-TENT WAR-NINGS
> 
> weight gain due to binge eating disorder, and the subsequent body image issues! discussion of starvation and malnutrition! mentions of unsanitary food! (implied coprophagia and cannibalism!) remember the fratricide thing we had? and the whole suicide attempt? hell yeah we get into that shit!!!!!!
> 
> stay safe. be wary if you're, like, a baby. i don't mean that in a demeaning way. i called myself a kid until i was nineteen. be proud of your babyhood. take care of yourself, and maybe you won't be writing venty fanfiction of your worst fears in your early twenties because you have no ability to work and no control over your thoughts

In his nightmares, Thomas eats.

He doesn’t know what he eats, because Roman doesn’t care, and he blocks Remus’s influence from the dreams. If Remus was there, offering his sickening input, Thomas would be eating cookies with soft chips that aren’t chocolate, and the stomachs of split-open corpses, and other things that have popped up in the times their minds have blended together.

Thomas eats endlessly, never feeling full, because he’s disgusting, and he’s never going to be satisfied, ever – neither of them will! He’s throwing away his dreams in favour of petty, passing feelings, and Roman will never forgive him for that.

When Thomas is awake, he tries not to eat. He remembers how huge he was in his dreams – the size of a blimp! – and he’d lose his appetite from Roman’s intrusive reminders.

He should starve. That’s the best path forwards from here. Thomas should just stop eating, and let his body eat away at all the fat it’s accumulated. Remus lets that thought echo through the mind – along, along, along – just to plant its roots in Virgil’s insecurity, and it works exactly like he’d planned.

Thomas is bringing his right hand to his mouth, in order to feed himself a slice of toast. It’s smeared in Crofters, and, _ugh_ , all that sickly sugar and thick bread will push him even closer to two-hundred pounds. Then what’s he going to do? Keep pretending that he ever has a chance of losing weight again? Like he’s going to be attractive again?

Remus will have an easier time of convincing Thomas to end it, then, so he can’t really complain.

“ _Don’t_ ,” Virgil growls in his resonating, dangerous tone.

Thomas slaps the toast away from him with his free hand. As though it is in slow motion, the two of them watch it fall to the floor. It bounces off of the side of the table on one crusted edge, and rotates a little in the air like a weirdly square gymnast doing a somersault, before a quiet _splat_ announces that it has completed its maiden voyage, to lie jam-side-down on the tiles.

Thomas turns to his left to blink at Virgil. “Dude, what the fuck?”

“Eating’s wrong.”

Virgil has hunched over, perched on a kitchen chair on his tiptoes, curled up in a ball inside his old black-check hoodie and trying to minimise his presence. Roman would scoff, were he present. Virgil can hide himself from the world about as well as an elephant can hide in a flat desert. They’re the same size, anyway.

Once again, Thomas blinks at Virgil, as if anticipating an answer. When none arrives, Thomas says, “No, it’s not.”

Virgil looks up. His fist tugs on his hood, his knuckles turning white. “It _is_.”

“It really isn’t,” Thomas explains, with a sigh. The next thing he says sounds almost like he’s reciting it from memory, and, with how anal Logan gets, Roman guesses he is. “I need to continue a regular food intake in order to avoid malnutrition and prevent my metabolism from slowing. Skipping meals will only lead me to bingeing in order to try and make up for not eating.”

Ha! Like Thomas won’t binge anyway.

“You… _I_ don’t have enough self-control, though,” Virgil intones, as if he’s reading Roman’s mind. “You’ll just end up bingeing, regardless of what you do and don’t eat at other times. Isn’t it better to at least _try_ and stop eating?”

Thomas looks at an empty space to the right of the refrigerator, and, a moment later, Logan rises up. He still wears his tie under a neat collar, but the rest of his shirt is covered by a knitted jumper the same colour as a clear night sky, which is dotted with the occasional silver-white stitch. It’s actually rather tasteful. Did Remus make it?

“What is it?” he asks. Then he looks down, spots the toast’s resting place, and states, very plainly, “Ah.”

“Virgil thinks that I’m going to lose control and binge, so I should just stop eating,” drones Thomas, staring at the cooling slice of toast still on his plate.

Logan’s face scrunches up as he squints. “That doesn’t make sense, beyond a superficial understanding of how bodies work.”

“He stops eating, he loses weight,” shrugs Virgil. His voice is harsh, and just as angry as Roman feels, but there’s an air of begging desperation around it, too.

Roman pushes away the empathy. He doesn’t need to be reminded of how pathetic he used to be.

“For a few weeks, perhaps,” Logan says. “It’s more likely that he’ll die of malnutrition before significant weight loss occurs.”

Virgil gestures with a hand. His fingers poke out from where the sleeves are pulled over his palms. For a moment, Roman feels like he's finally going to give a voice to the feelings that all of them harbour, but that all the remaining innermost Sides repress. “Then we let him eat one thing. A meal a day. We work out the least amount he needs to eat, and we just have that.”

“Also illogical.”

Thomas stands up and grabs an apple. He can at least try to eat that, and leave the Sides to argue over this stupid food issue he’s developed. Dr. Faber calls it ' _Binge-Eating Disorder_ ', but what does he know?

Well, Dr. Faber is a therapist and psychiatrist, so… _Yeah_.

* * *

An hour or so later, Logan listens to his centre as he touches the enamel pin he attached to his jumper.

Thomas sighs through his nose.

“Right. We’re making a video.” Then, in a more theatrical, open voice, he exclaims to the camera, “What is _up_ , everybody?”

He’s set everything up, and his clothes are different, but he still looks just as stressed as he did this morning.

“Is this regarding this morning’s altercation?” asks Logan. Well, it must be, since that’s the only major issue that has occurred to Thomas today.

“No,” Thomas replies.

 _Well_ , then.

“Yes! I don’t know!” Thomas cries out, burying his face in his hands. “I guess it exacerbated it?”

Virgil appears, and Logan sees Thomas jolt a little, like he’s been hit with static electricity.

He says, “I know I’m in the wrong, but I maintain what I said.”

Logan narrows his eyes. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“I know it doesn’t. Anxiety doesn’t _have_ to make sense.” Virgil looks down at his hands, pressing the tips of his bitten thumbnails together. “ _I_ don’t make sense.”

Logan searches his brain for something kind to say. “Falsehood. Disregarding myself, obviously, out of all of Thomas’s Sides, you’re generally the one who understands and implements logical thinking to the best degree.”

Shaking his head, Virgil responds, “That was before.”

Before depression took hold of Thomas.

“You put him in the recovery position.”

Logan’s voice is low when he says that.

“You- I- That’s not the _point_.” Virgil’s sputtering becomes a low tone that he continues to speak with. “I’m the one telling Thomas to stop eating altogether, like it’s going to make him lose weight until he’s presentable again.”

Logan metaphorically squashes down the figurative spark of rage that tries to ignite within him. “He _is_ presentable. He needs to continue eating on a regular basis to instil in him a proper food intake schedule, which will help us to resist the disorder.”

“He needs to stop eating to make up for how much he loses control and gorges himself,” Virgil growls back. “He needs to go back to being worthwhile.”

 _What_? Logan adjusts his glasses, leaning forwards, as if he’ll see a flaw in Virgil’s existence to prove that he’s a fake, and that the real Virgil would never think such a thing.

Of course, there are no cracks in the façade of a different Side, because that _is_ the real Virgil.

“We’ve been over this so many times, Virgil.” Logan recites, because they _have_ been over this so many times that he’s memorised it. “It doesn’t matter how fat or thin a person is. Health and beauty are not determined by weight or size, and _neither is someone’s worth_.”

“Except for us,” adds Virgil.

“What? No,” says Logan. “Those rules are universal. Thomas’s poor health is a result of his mental illness.”

“Can you both _shut up_?”

Thomas screams that out loud, tugging on his hair hard enough that he pulls some of it out. Logan and Virgil both fall silent, and Logan, at least, is ashamed to admit that he had almost forgotten that Thomas was even _there_.

“That’s all it’s ever about now, isn’t it?” cries Thomas. “It’s all about the eating disorder. What, do you think I get a new problem, and the old ones disappear?”

Like a question, Virgil responds, “No? This is just the problem right now. We’ve got to solve it to get back to the old shit.”

“Your medication and therapy is adequate,” Logan states, but even as he says it, he can point out every issue in that line of thinking. He takes a moment to think, and to wrack through Thomas’s brain for some kind of answer. “Do you mean that this disorder is a symptom of your depression, and not a new influence?”

“Yes!” Thomas says. “No! It’s all a cycle, and this is yet another thing that’s making itself known, especially since the other night.”

Logan exhales through his teeth. “Ah. The bingeing episode.”

“Yeah, both of us kind of clock out when that happens,” Virgil admits. “Even if we’re there, Logan doesn’t remember anything, and I stop being able to make any input until it’s too late.”

“Too late?” asks Logan. “Virgil, do you recall some of the events of that night?”

Virgil nods. “A bit, yeah.”

After a moment of silence, wherein Logan glances momentarily at Thomas, who’s tugging on the neck of his hoodie, Logan asks, “Are you willing to share that information.

A second of consideration later, Virgil shrugs. “Sure. Thomas was full, but he kept eating.”

“That,” states Logan, after a significantly longer moment, “is the _definition of a binge_!”

“Calm down!” Virgil’s responding tone is not calm. “It was just… He was angry at himself, and ashamed, and when I added the anxiety…”

“Awful lot of ‘A’s,” Thomas interjects.

Virgil makes a gesture with his hands as though he’s imitating an explosion. “And I was out of there.”

“I remember that I was in control, at the end, and I chose to keep eating,” Thomas murmurs. “I hated it. I still hate it. I didn’t want to hurt myself, or anything.”

“Falsehood.”

It’s said with a much calmer tone than Logan feels capable of, now. If Logan speaks, he’s not sure that he’ll be able to avoid yelling in some extreme of emotion.

Thomas is yelling, _“Deceit!”_ so Logan has a fairly decent idea of who just showed up.

And, well, at least he’s feeling an emotion, anyway. It could be far worse. He could be back to the numbness that weighed on all of them last month. Last year. Yesterday. Logan’s not quite sure, to be honest.

“Tell them the truth, Thomas,” groans Ethan, still gentle-voiced.

“You’re not going to tell them yourself?” Thomas seems genuinely surprised at that.

After a second of his eyebrows being raised, Logan realises that he feels the same way.

Ethan shakes his head. The skin around his snake eye seems darker and duller than before.

“And you’re not going to lead me around with a bunch of dramatics until I admit it?” asks Thomas.

Again, Ethan shakes his head. “I’m too tired.”

Thomas tilts his head. “So, I could just… Not answer?”

At that, Ethan smirks, slightly. “ _Sure_ you won’t.”

Even before Ethan’s tongue clicks on the last phonetic of his last word, Thomas is talking.

“I wanted to hurt myself. I did that by bingeing.” He glares at Ethan, as though the man had actually forced him to speak. “Now, can we actually get to the _point_?”

“You had a problem. We solved it.” Ethan waves a gloved hand, limp-wristed and uncaring. Well, that’s rather faulty logic. “Can we wrap this up, now?”

“No!” About ten decibels louder, and Logan thinks that Thomas would have screamed that word. He continues, yelling, “I’ve been _trying_ to think of something for a proper video for _ages_ ; one that isn’t me talking to myself about my problems, because I _don’t want_ to become the guy who suddenly lost all of his emotions and subsequently lost control of his life. I want to be funny, and entertaining, and all of the things that I used to be! Whenever I come up with an idea, I can’t even write past an outline, and then I realise that I’ve _already made_ that video _before_!”

“You need to spend more time looking after your mental health,” Ethan replies, hollowly.

“Shut the _hell_ up, Deceit, unless you’re going to tell me where my Creativities are.” Thomas moves from that growl back to the same shouts as he was letting out before. “I’ll take anything! I’d write a whole horror script for Remus of the most reprehensible shit he suggests. I’ll write every tragedy that Roman demands! I just need any kind of self-esteem again! I just- want- them- _back_!”

By the last sentence, he’s tugging at the air in front of him, in front of the TV, where Ethan is standing. By the last word, he stops, because he’s succeeded.

Something is rising through the floor.

* * *

For once; just for once, Virgil would like to be validated by something that isn’t terrifying.

Unfortunately, since most of his existence revolves around identifying the worst-case scenario, which is usually terrifying due to being the most awful thing that can possibly happen, no matter how implausible, if Virgil is right about something, shit’s probably going to get sucky.

For one, Deceit’s practically leapt from his place in front of the TV to Patton’s old place, next to Hope.

Hope himself glances around, looking at his hands in the way that he does after a reappearance, as if he’s still bewilderedly excited by having a physical form. He waves to everyone, smiling like he can’t feel the dread filling the room like radon, or whatever. The air’s heavy, is what Virgil means, and he’s fucking terrified.

Deceit places a hand on Hope’s shoulder and pulls him closer, but Virgil can’t tell if it’s to protect him or reassure him.

Worst-case, it’s to use him as a meat shield, which probably wouldn’t work anyway. Hope’s going to disappear as soon as they see what’s coming from the ground.

The hair is about the only thing that looks right. It’s dark, and matted, and there’s a thin grey streak near the front, like Remus’s.

Virgil could only be so lucky if the feeling that rises with the thing in the ground was Remus. It doesn’t feel like that stomach-turning repulsion, like if you were served roadkill instead of turkey at Thanksgiving.

It feels worse.

“Roman!” Thomas is beaming, calling out. “Remus!”

“Please, Thomas, stop.” Deceit’s voice actually sounds _honest_ , for once.

Well, maybe that’s harsh, but Deceit’s been hiding things. He’s gone back to his old role of generally being a jerk, instead of trying to step in for Patton like the wicked stepmother in a fairy-tale.

Maybe that was for the better.

The thing rises up, and its face is _not possible_. Two brown eyes like Thomas’s, yes, but there is a third eye socket between them; one which is far too wide to hold an eyeball. Thankfully, the lid is sealed shut with crusting brown blood and dried pus.

A nose with two bridges, and three nostrils. Part of the upper lip beneath it is bleeding, like someone tugged out a bunch of hair at once, but the remnants of a poorly-maintained moustache still fall in the corner of one of the two pairs of lips, to be spat out with an empty smile.

Two mouths, and two chins that connect to the single cranium. One smiles and one sneers, but both of them move in unison, because their jawbones connect at the sides closest to each other.

Two necks, separated enough that Virgil could stick his arm between them, which connect to a torso that only seems to fit into clothes because its bloodstained grey shirt has a ridiculously low V-neck. It’s decorated with ridiculous ruffles, like a pirate. A limp baby’s arm emerges from the centre of its chest, just under where the thing’s sternum should be, if it even has one. The arm flops uselessly. A ridiculous part of Virgil wants to take the tiny hand and shake it. A stronger part wants to rip it off.

The legs of the thing are the most normal part. Just two normal legs, dressed in black jodhpurs that only cut off at the knee on the right side. That side, incidentally, has another calf and foot hanging from the bared knee. The extraneous foot, unlike the others, does not wear white boots. It just hangs, bare and blue-toed.

Virgil wants to sink out; to run and hide for something safe, but something in Thomas calls for the monster, and sings as it responds to him.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he hisses, as the realisation dawns on him. “ _That’s_ Creativity.”

With the left mouth mouthing along with its tongue limply poking out the corner, becoming bloodier with every unacknowledged bite, Creativity says, in a rasping sing-song, “ _He tried to kill me_.”

“Roman was becoming more self-destructive, and Remus tried to fill his brother’s old roles,” Virgil hears Ethan explain, gently, like a bedtime story. “I’ve never gotten the full story out of them, but I believe that Remus acted in self-defence.”

“ _Remus_ did?” Logan seems to be unsurprised, but he voices the question that Virgil would, if he could open his mouth without puking up whatever Thomas scrounged up for breakfast.

“Roman tried to kill Thomas; don’t forget.”

“There’s nothing left,” both of the mouths say, with two very different tones.

The rightmost mouth continues, just how it’s always been speaking. “There’s no creativity left. I’ve tried for you, Thomas. I’ve tried so hard.” A pink tear runs down its cheek. “This is all that’s left. _This is all that’s left_!”

“I found them, drifting in the remnants of your passion,” Ethan tells Thomas. “I hid them, in the hopes that they wouldn’t hurt you. Roman was… Rather insistent on harming you.”

Both of the mouths, once again, in slurred unison: “I failed Thomas. _You_ failed Thomas.”

They scream: “ _No_ , _you_ did! You! _You_! I want to _help_! I wanted to help!”

Like mitosis in motion, the heads split apart. It’s revolting. It’s intriguing. Mostly, though, it’s just kind of weird. Cranium from cranium, until there are two faces that, if they weren’t so damaged, would look just like Thomas.

“Roman,” Thomas breathes, with a disbelieving smile spreading across his face. “Remus.”

“I didn’t mean to,” the leftmost head sobs, tugging at his grey lock of hair. “ _Please_ , believe me! I didn’t _mean_ to!”

The one on the right merely reaches his arms up, stroking the upper-left side of his head, newly separated from his twin.

He smiles until his eyes crinkle, wide and toothy and adoring.

“Greetings, Thomas.”


End file.
